GQ's critic looks at the much-hyped new teen drama, The Myth of the American Sleepover, and discovers an ultimately harmless art film in disguise

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Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, The Myth of the American Sleepover has the kind of duff title that makes you figure you're in for preciosity by the bucketload. And in fact, more than a few thimblefuls of the stuff are on display. This account of a single night in the interlinked lives of a bunch of Detroit suburban teens the weekend before school begins—think American Graffiti gone minimalist or Dazed and Confused minus dope—is a good movie that might have been better if it were less self-consciously artful.

Indie directors today are about evenly divided between people a mite vain of their A-plus in Camera Placement 101 and proudly slovenly bums who wouldn't know what composition was if it bit them on the keister at MoMA. Mitchell is definitely in the former camp. He's also advertising his career goals by making his feature debut with a tasteful teen movie—you know, the kind oldsters admire instead of the crass ones real-world teenagers actually identify with and get off on. He does have a sure hand, though, and Sleepover stays effortlessly captivating even at its most mannered.

For one thing, Mitchell weaves his multiple storylines with considerable laconic grace, though it does take us a while to sort out who's connected to who—or, in some cases, to decide it doesn't matter. In a cast packed with fetching young actors, the first one we get a bead on is Claire Sloma as gamine-ish Maggie, who manages to win a bottle of vodka at a drunken talent contest during a lakeside swimming party without ever crossing the good girl/bad girl divide. In the most direct lift from American Graffiti, broody Rob (Marlon Morton) spends the movie in search of an unknown blonde he's spotted in the supermarket, despite his restless pals' mockery. New girl in town Claudia (Amanda Bauer) finds out that her boyfriend has cheated on her with trashy Janelle (Shayla Curran) by thumbing through Janelle's diary at another boozy bash. Meanwhile, college dropout Scott (Brett Jacobsen), back home after a busted romance, is trying to reconnect with the pretty twins he remembers from a high-school production of—cough, cough—The Odyssey.

That's just one hint that all this is supposed to be a mythic distillation of teenland, not reportage. Even which decade the movie is set in is kept vague, with modern gadgetry conspicuously absent and other details that are coyly old-fashioned, like that diary. Do even teenage girls still keep those anymore, let alone futz with Ouija boards?

Not only is the locale plainly meant to stand for Anytown, U.S.A. (this is definitely not the movie to see for updates on Detroit's decline)—the plot's happenings are a fairy-tale succession of sleepovers, parties and visits to make-out dens from which parents, teachers, cops and any other authority figures are largely MIA. While the amount of underage drinking on display could make a hardened alcoholic blanch, drugs are primly off the menu. And so, despite a lot of chatter about it, is sex; it's not even clear just what being cheated on would mean in this context, since we don't know if any of these kiddies are actually Doing It.

Aside from the constant juicing (and it doesn't bring anybody to harm, incidentally: no date rape, no car crashes, no real consequences at all), we're pretty much watching Archie, Betty, Veronica and Jughead as reinterpreted by Francois Truffaut. Then again, the Archie comics do have their timeless charms—and a movie that can earn even a backhanded comparison to Truffaut is nothing to sneeze at, either. The Myth of the American Sleepover has its maddening side, but it's also got any number of well-observed moments, convincing perceptions, and memorable bits of behavior: the saucy but innocent dance routine Sloma's Maggie performs to win that vodka bottle, for instance, or the interplay of thoughtfulness and quizzical grins in Jacobsen's expressive face and Bauer's odd serenity when she confronts her boyfriend. It's clear that Mitchell has unusual gifts, so keep an eye peeled for whatever he does next. Maybe he'll even loosen up enough to catch on to what John Hughes always knew—namely, that the poetry of teenhood isn't marred by an occasional fart joke. Kind of the opposite, in fact.